Orlando and Alternative Pleasures

Pamela Chan
CTCS 412 (Blog Week 3)

                To the least, Sally Potter’s art house film Orlando was more than a little thought provoking. Yet despite the controversy that has surrounded this loose adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, the film, by itself, most definitely introduced me to a variety of intriguing concepts of feminism that I had initially been unfamiliar with.

We touched upon many of the different theories in Monday's class discussion, but after reading Jane Gaines’ piece “Women and Representation: Can We Enjoy Alternative Pleasure?”, it became rather clear that as a film, Orlando not only approached a highly controversial subject matter with grace and poignancy, but it also succeeded on multiple levels as an ‘art’ film, as a form of feminist ‘counter cinema,’ and as an effective example of something that might be able to disrupt Laura Mulvey’s concept of “visual pleasure.” It’s a film we might actually be able to view as an enjoyable “alternative pleasure.”

In her piece, Gaines first addresses the issues of the “male gaze,” of essentialism, and of the “impossibility of female expression in male dominated culture.” She goes on to introduce the subject of counter cinema or “the creation of a new language of desire [made] contingent on the destruction of male pleasure.” I found her advocation of the pioneering of this “new aesthetic based on refusal” to be rather intriguing. She argues “investigating women’s pleasure as counter pleasures has become politically imperative” and that it is vitally important in future gender media studies to see how “difference interacts with the dominant.”

With Orlando, Potter attempts to subvert conventional cinematic techniques in order to change the way we read and understand film, gender, and identity.  The film offers a new, feminist perspective, “gaze,” and message, all while touching upon various issues of feminism, gender politics, and imperialism.

Experiencing the sex change of a male to a female, the protagonist can most definitely be seen as a paradox. In the end, Orlando comes to embrace his/her androgyny. I think that the film furthers the notion that gender is indeed not based on biological sex, but is, instead, constructed. It also seems to blur the lines of sexual identity, as well as the various constructions society has made about masculinity and femininity. In the end, the entire film is, as the late Roger Ebert put it, simply a film about the “vision of human existence. What does it mean to be born as a woman, or a man? To be born at one time instead of another? To be born into wealth, or into poverty, or into the tradition of a particular nation?” In one of the scenes, Orlando answers matter-of-factly that there “really [is] no difference at all.” I found that pretty inspirational.